NFL asks teams to stop running the Oklahoma drill, but Matt Patricia’s is a little different

Matt Patricia wanted to bring toughness back to the Lions, and so his very first training camp practices were meant to set the tone. Once the pads came on and hitting was legal, almost everything they did involved some kind of crack of the pads.

But his approach to one of the old-school drills had a noticeable drop in the intensity of the hits. Patricia brought out the Oklahoma drill, the favorite of high school coaches for decades, where players lie on the ground with their helmets almost touching and then scurry up to engage in contact at the sound of a whistle. His version, though, made the tackle a merely simulated exercise. He said he did it with the hope of better safety techniques in mind.

Less than a year later, the NFL is making its own statement against the old-school drill. The Oklahoma is one of three drills the NFL has asked teams to stop running, at least in their traditional form.

The other two are the Bull in the Ring, also known as the King of the Circle; and the Pods drill, also known as Half Line or 3 Spot.

In the Bull in the Ring, two players face each other face-to-face and fight to push one out of a ring before the other does. The Pods drill is like a team drill that uses only half of the line on each side.

The decision came officially Wednesday at the league’s spring meeting in Key Biscayne, Fla., but it is rooted in an April 17 discussion with a number of current and former coaches and former players. The decision is ultimately a response to data that showed that concussion rates rise during the early portion of training camp, when teams often look to re-introduce players to contact after a soft offseason.

Bill Belichick once said the Oklahoma drill answered key questions right away: “Who is a man? Who’s tough? Who’s going to hit somebody?"

Patricia, of course, spent his first 14 years in the league working under Belichick and has modeled much of his roster, front office, coaching staff and principles after the way his mentor ran the show in New England. But last year, when he brought the Oklahoma drill to Lions practices, he emphasized that his version was different.

“Really what it was was trying to put everybody in a close proximity, kind of a one-step situation that was a little bit more than a set up where we could concentrate on keeping the head up, keeping the top of the helmet out of where the contact points should be, trying to make sure that the facemask — we’re seeing what we hit and doing that in more of a reactionary sort of method as opposed to a staged method," Patricia said.

Whether the league intervenes on Patricia’s version remains to be seen, but it’s a fundamentally different approach than the one they seemed to target with concussion data in the spring meeting.

Others of his more physical drills could come into question, as teams around the league are going to have to modify their practices to fit the safer direction the league is trying to go.